During the last geometry nodes workshop we started discussing a new “Slide” operator for nodes. It’s expected to be a more predictable alternative to the auto-offset feature to easily make space for inserting more nodes. A working prototype is available already.
We still need some more feedback on the exact behavior. It’s fairly simple to make this work well on simple node trees, but it’s tricky on more complex ones, because a tool like this can quite easily accidentally mess up a node tree elsewhere.
Based on the exact functionality, we also still need to add some visual indicators to make it more obvious what is happening when the operator is triggered. It’s not clear what that should look like yet.
So please give it a try (download here) on your node trees and let us know what you think and what you want to improve.
Seems like a really cool idea. I think it would be nicer to have the action connected to modifer key + click rather than V + click, but I understand that a lot of modifier + click configurations are already taken.
I’m also wondering how useful vertical movement could be. As in you hold V and click, then all the nodes left of the cursor can be shifted left, right, up, down, and everything inbetween. Although I understand it can also be difficult to decide if nodes left of the cursor or right of the cursor should be shifted if a user only makes a vertical movement.
Off the top of my head I think my preference would be to click/select a node and then press G twice to activate slide. In other words just like slide a vertex in edit mode. Something many of us are very use to doing.
Quite like this! Would also love the ability to click on a specific node and only affect the nodes connected up until that point, because there are times trees branch and stack above or below
So in this case if I wanted to move only the nodes in the backdrop “triangle” I woulda end up moving the other backdrops above and below, which may not be wanted behavior. I think if we had both of these functionalities, likely different commands that would be primo!
Holding V then clicking and dragging on a node does exactly what you described. Only the node I selected and it’s dependencies are shifted. Everything else is left along. It’s also the first action in the demo video in the original post.
Is it not working for you or are you describing something else?
